I recently acquired a SCSI2SD adapter to replace a failing SCSI drive from the 1990s, so thought I’d document some of the options I’ve found for initializing and partitioning bootable drives for classic Macintosh systems.

1. Limitations when initializing/partitioning a drive under System 6.x and System 7.x.

System 4.1 to 6.08 can only support 2 GB partitions, System 7.5 introduced support for 4 GB partitions, and System 7.5.2 introduced support for 2 TB partitions for some systems (See Apple KBase Article 8647)

You can only have 12 mounted partitions at one time. Not 12 per drive, 12 total. I tested this using SCSI2SD with a 32 gig SD card set up as two 16 gig hard drives, with each drive partitioned in to eight 2 gig partitions. I could only mount 12 of the 16 partitions. This may be a limitation of HD SC Setup, will experiment with other 3rd party solutions.

2. Deciding what types and sizes of partitions you plan to create

If you plan to use the Apple IIe card you will want to create at least one (max two) 32MB (yes MB) partitions that you’ll later initialize as ProDos partitions to use with your Apple IIe card.

3. Options for getting your drive initialized and partitioned

There are two main methods for getting your drive initialized and partitioned:

Connecting the drive you want to initialize and partition directly to your classic Macintosh system, then boot your system using one of the boot options I’ve previously listed (e.g. Floppy Drive, CD-ROM etc.) with the drive you want to initialize and partition attached as a secondary drive.

Hello Steve,
I’m trying to set up a SCSI2SD adapter, V5.1. I am using the patched version of HD SC Setup 7.3.5. and while it can find the drives, when I try to initialize, it acts like its starting to message says “initializing disk…verifying format” and “updating driver…in progress” then gives me an error message of ” the disk could not initialized. ” and “Unable to mount volume”.
Any suggestions on what to try next?
Mike

HI Steve, I have followed all your steps and when I put the SD in the SCSI2D adapter on the SE/30 I can only see SCSI 0 with your image. I click on Drive and it does not change. Also tried LIDO 7 with the same result. However, when plugging to SCSI2SD in my Mac and run SCSI-Util Load from the device I see that I have 2 devices set up Device 1 and Device 2., I have tried it several times and partitions work but not setting up a second Device any ideas?